Act Three: Nous
by RavenTears
Summary: I know what you're thinking -- Act 3? Where are Acts 1 and 2? Well, I haven't written them yet. This is a very serious drama centering around Quatre and Newtypes.
1. Scene 1: part one

Act III: Nous

  


Scene 1: "irresistible impulse"

  


With a startled jolt, Quatre awoke, shivering and sweat-soaked in his darkened bedroom. He glanced around, searching the shadows for invisible enemies, but his scrutiny yielded nothing atypical in the nondescript room.

He looked down at his hands, their blurred outlines shaking in the darkness, and buried his face in them. He panted, waiting for his heartbeat to calm, and when it had, he pulled back the hot covers and stumbled out of bed.

Inside the bathroom, he jumped at the sight of his own darkened reflection in the vanity mirror, his exploited nerves still hypersensitive from the sensory-hell of his nightmare. His hand found the light switch and Quatre flinched away from the unforgiving fluorescent lights. When his eyes had adjusted, his gaze drifted over his surroundings. Some of his former humor returned to him as he mused on the exorcizing benefits of fluorescent lights. They quite effectively banished all shadows.

And on this night, the shadows held demons, and nightmares, and people crying out for help. Help he could not give, help whose need he did not understand, help whose need he feared. Someone was looking for him. _Someone_ was reaching out to his mind.

But whoever's fingers they were, grating on his consciousness, they reeked of desperation, loneliness, and – most frightening to him – insanity. All of these things they carried with them and forced upon him in stark and utter clarity.

He stared at his now sharp, pale reflection, wondering how he ended up on the other side of the looking-glass – how he of all people was on the other side of reality and physicality. Why his psychic body was so much bigger and stronger and more adept than his physical body. Why he was the inverted being. Why he was so sensitive to these things, to these people, to these fingers, to these feelings.

Whoever was asking for his help was either unknowingly, unwittingly, or maliciously bringing their pain and fear and whatever else on him. He was left with an ultimatum. 

He could ignore the dreams and the fingers in his mind, but in all likelihood they would not stop. They would persist until their problem was solved or they were rendered incapable of reaching out any longer. Or he could try to seek out this person and help them, but that would be a near-impossible undertaking. Of the ten billion people in the Earth Sphere, how could he find one among so many? How could this person expect this of him?

He suddenly grew angry at this person who was gnawing at his brain. He felt _mad_ at them for asking this impossible task of him. Why should _he _have to do it? Why couldn't they fix their own problems? Why couldn't they ask someone else?

But he knew. He always knew that these people rarely had any idea of what they were doing to him, or others, or themselves. These people hardly ever knew what they were – that they had this ability, or that they were hurting anyone else. And of those who did, few would confess to it. _ Newtype_ had become such an ugly word since the first government experiments.

His breathing had slowed, as had his heartbeat. The horrible images, the colors, the feelings had retreated in his wakefulness. He sighed and wiped away the lingering sweat.

It saddened him. He wasn't sure what "it" was, but it saddened him. Maybe it was an aftertaste of whoever's mind had tickled his, or maybe it was his own guilt, regret at this burden. But for some reason he did not make it to the sink, to the cold tap water, or to the waiting washcloth where he was going to wash his face. Instead he crumpled to the floor. To the cold, tiled floor, in the cold, tiled, shadowless room with the unforgiving fluorescent light, and cried.

He cried for his own heartache, he cried for the heartache of others that permeated his mind, he cried for the memories of others that he had seen unwillingly, unknowingly at times. Everyone else's pain just seemed to filter past his skin into his mind, and now it crept up in him in his weakness and he cried.

*

"This is getting me nowhere," Quatre snapped in frustration at the computer screen. With a melodramatic sigh, he pushed back in his chair and stared at the screen from a distance, glaring furiously at the blinking white cursor on the blue screen. 

"Damn cursor." It was just too happy to await his typing digits, and it did wait expectantly for his resumption of the task at hand. He could write volumes about the dreams and the emotions he felt from her, but her location was never clear during or after the dream. Usually, he could either get a feel for the person's location or their identity, but the emotions he felt from her were very confusing; they were blurry, but sharp at the same time – somehow loud and muted simultaneously.

Quatre had heard of devices implanted in Newtypes to suppress their abilities and now he began to suspect that some such device might be responsible for the interference between himself and the Crier. He'd never before encountered someone with a suppressive implant, but he supposed that was because the implants worked. Which meant that if this person indeed had the implant and still was able to reach out to him and overwhelm his defenses, then she was extremely powerful and in desperate need of help.

Leaning back in his chair, Quatre sighed with resignation. With what he knew about suppressive implants, Quatre realized that it would take an active effort on his part to reach out to her to discover her identity. As far as he was aware, suppressive devices, though extremely adept at suppressing a Newtype's own abilities, could not defend that person's mind from the intrusion of another Newtype.

That decided, Quatre got up from his seat at the computer and left the room to find his secretary and tell him to put on a pot of coffee. Strong coffee.

*

Quatre sat motionless on top of the coverlet of his bed in the traditional lotus position with his legs crossed on top of each other and his hands resting palm-up on the tops of his knees. He'd been sitting like that for several hours already, waiting for the Crier to seek him out in the safety of her dream-state oblivion, but the passage of time seemed inconsequential to him in his heightened state of meditation. He spent his wait visualizing and focusing his energy, picturing it as a glowing, shifting sphere at the center of his being. He stretched it this way and that, testingly sending out tendrils of energy through the walls around him and sampling the dreamscapes of those who slept nearby. His efforts returned to him a multitude of colors and muted emotions from the unconscious minds around him – all completely uninterpretable to him. The only minds accessible to him in unconsciousness were those of empathic Newtypes, and there were none in this particular hotel, or indeed in a several block radius of it.

None that he could find at least. Quatre's thoughts drifted back to the suppressive devices he suspected were responsible for rendering the Crier's message unintelligible, and he realized how little he really knew about them. He wondered briefly if he would even be able to detect the devices if she indeed was under their influence.

Quatre was in the process of contemplating their design when the first threads of the Crier's mind tickled the edge of his senses. He was given precious little time to prepare before her mind collided with his full force.

He pulled his energy back into its tight little ball before hastily reinforcing his mental barriers in preparation for the wash of jumbled thought and an emotion he knew could easily overwhelm him if he wasn't careful. Suddenly he felt the white-hot emotions surround him and envelope him his mind, but he expertly repressed the panic rising in his consciousness. She raged against his walls and slowly he began to ease his barriers in an effort to control her access to his thoughts. Her mind seared his as she trickled past his barriers, eliciting a shudder from Quatre's physical body. So much anger and hatred and fear coursed shapeless and undefined through his nerves, but Quatre was undeterred and continued the lowering of his defenses with agonizing slowness.

Finally he was able to remove all of his energy from the barriers and refocus them to trace the Crier. Quatre concentrated on following the stream of raw emotion to its source, feeling more and more distant from his body. Gradually his physical senses grew duller and his psychic senses sharper as he let his mind wander away from his body, an act that added to his empathic strength while simultaneously rendering him more vulnerable and frail.

The emotions became stronger as Quatre drifted further from physicality and soon he had traced the torrent back to its source. He was completely surrounded by the white, incoherent emotions, and Quatre felt her mind for barriers. Finding none, he began the tedious process of dividing the white light into the innumerable colors of the equally innumerable individual emotions.

~

A scream tore itself from her lungs as she fought to wrest her mind from the icy claws of her nightmare. Panic and terror filled her as her head swam – not quite accepting her awakened state, and rendering her unable to recognize her own hands as her nails raked over the clammy skin of her arms and shoulders. Her eyes refused to focus, instead showing her only blurry images obscured by shadows while her head continued to spin, completely unable to differentiate between up and down.

Despite such physical handicaps, her intent remained to drive the grotesque and horrifying images of her nightmare from her eyes. She bit her lip, clawed at her skin, but the feeling of anarchy in her mind dominated and she was unable to force her subconscious into wakeful submission.

She threw herself from the bed, falling to the floor when her legs refused to obey her chaotic mind. Waves of nausea swept her and she fought to pull herself up, desperate to end her suffering. She crawled the short distance from the bed to her dresser and pulled herself up upon it, shoving several articles from its surface as her body lurched forward, collapsing atop the bureau. Her hands drunkenly groped for the wall and the mirror she knew hung there. The back of her hand brushed the frame and with what little motor control she could muster, she flung the mirror from its hanger, hearing it shatter with a satisfying crash. She allowed herself to collapse back to the floor, the room still swimming in her vision. Another wave of nausea wracked her and she panted desperately on the floor, not even waiting for it to pass before dragging herself to the shards of mirrored glass she knew were lying on the floor just out of her grasp. She reached out across the floor with a shaky hand, hearing the clink of glass on glass before feeling the fragments under her fingertips. With as much concentration as she could muster, she closed her clammy hand around the largest piece she could reach and squeezed.

~

Quatre lost his concentration as an outside power began to violently force him from her mind. The once clear images swirled and blurred as Quatre lost his grip on the Crier and was flung from the confines of intelligible thought. He reeled, floundering in an unnavigable sea of emotion, but was able to summon enough coherent thought to realize that he had to slow his expulsion. Quatre rallied his strength and carefully disentangled himself from her psyche while trying to subdue her conscious mind.

~

A gasp escaped her as the pain exploded from her hand, forcefully burning away the mental haze like the sun burning away morning fog. Her hand jerked open instinctively and she tried to fling the glass from her palm, but it was imbedded too deeply in her skin to be removed so easily. As the pain cleared her mind, she exerted mastery over her instincts and managed to close the trembling hand once again around the shard, driving it deeper into her flesh.

She was rewarded with a surge of lucidity as the pain shot up from her hand, racing like lightning up her arm to her shoulder. Finally she felt in control again, and a comfortable numbness was restored in her mind as the fear and panic subsided.

~

Quatre lay staring up at the canopy of his bed, unsure of where he was or what he was doing. Then slowly the memories trickled back and he became aware of his sweat-soaked clothing, labored breathing, and trembling limbs. He squeezed his eyes shut against the images burning in his memory, but succeeded only in enlivening the visions and forcing himself to relive the entire ordeal.

The Crier had shown him an image more horrible, more hate-filled, more utterly, utterly _red_ than he had seen in all the nights of the nightmares previously.

It was also a familiar image. He had seen it before – from someone else . . . in someone else's mind and heart.

He was more scared now than ever. He had never thought – never could have imagined. . . .

Quatre's own voice sounded foreign and obtuse as it filled his ears and brought him back to the outer world from the depths of his own mind. The sound he had made had been only an incoherent utterance, so Quatre cleared his throat and his mind, attempting again to say the name that had formed in his mouth, given shape by the images he had seen.

"Dorothy Catalonia."

~

"Quatre Raberba Winner," she whispered hoarsely into the silence of the darkened bedroom before succumbing to the encroaching oblivion.

*


	2. Scene 1: part two

Act III: Nous

  


Scene 1: "irresistible impulse"

  


*

"This is pathetic," he sighed in defeat. Quatre leaned back in his chair and frowned at the computer screen. The white cursor blinked as if in waiting on the blue background. 

Seven lines. All the information he had on Dorothy Catalonia took up a mere seven lines. 

Not even a middle name.

Most of it didn't even exist anymore, but was old data he'd scraped together from the background check he'd conducted in 195, and what little more he had been able to upload from the Sanc Kingdom's Order of the Royal Guard's records. 

The cursor continued to blink merrily, expecting him to continue typing. But he couldn't. He couldn't even be sure if the information that was anything worthy of basing his search on.

He sighed again, closing the word processing window and opening his jury-rigged search program. He typed in the word "Catalonia" and hit return.

"Over three hundred thousand returns," he announced to himself in a moment of masochism. He then added "Dorothy" to the search and hit return again. "No results to display," he read for what seemed like the thousandth time.

He leaned back further and stared at the ceiling tiles.

"How can a person just up and disappear?" he queried the ceiling. The paint proffered no answers.

The information was there. . . . It had to be. He _didn't_ just dream up her entire existence. _Or that belly wound,_ he reminded himself, absently touching the scar through the fabric of his shirt. It was just a matter of finding it. If he could, he'd ask the Duke of Suffolk himself, but Dermail was quite assuredly no longer among the living.

"Master Quatre?" Quatre snapped his head back down and shot a halfhearted glare at the intruder. The secretary shrunk away slightly and guilt forced Quatre to smile, which seemed to calm the frightened animal. Skittish creatures, those secretaries. "If this is a bad time. . . ."

"No, come in." He waved to the slight man who obeyed, cautiously leaving the safety of the doorway and seemingly amazed to find himself in the Winner Enterprise's impromptu Cambridge office. "Well?" he pressed the secretary.

"There's a call for you."

"There are thousands of calls for me every day."

"Y-yes, but . . . this man was quite persistent in his demands that we put him through to you. Obviously, the first time we closed the call immediately, but he called back and has somehow blocked our system commands so that we can no longer close the call." Quatre sighed, knowing whom it probably was calling him in his hotel room. 

"Did this man identify himself as Duo Maxwell?"

"Uh- yes, he did." The secretary's dark eyebrows shot skyward as realization dawned on him. "I sincerely apologize, Master Quatre; I had no idea he was an acquaintance of yours."

"Yes, yes," Quatre responded, waving him away. "Don't worry about it, just put him through." He had gone through similar incidences early in his presidency of Winner Enterprises, but after some months, the entire slew of secretaries and receptionists knew Duo's face and that _his_ calls would supercede all others received by their employer. His friend was no doubt annoyed at finding himself back at square one with Quatre's temporary staff during the New London Legislative Convention.

Pulling his chair up to the desk, he waited for his computer to beep at him before opening the call from Duo. His tension melted slightly as his friend's beaming face filled the monitor.

"Hey Quat! How ya holding up?" Quatre smiled back.

"Well enough. There's only a few more days of talks planned, and then I can go home." Duo rolled his eyes and waved his hand dismissively over his shoulder.

"Yeah, then you get to reassure the colonists that _yes_, you protected their interests, _no_, you were not swayed or intimidated by the Earth reps, and _no_, the Earth is _not_ out to dominate the Colonies. I don't think I could stand having to do all the mollycoddling you and Relena use to reassure the public." He accented his point with a melodramatic facial gesture.

"They don't trust each other entirely yet," Quatre defended. "I'm confident that in time people will truly become unified in this Unified Nation we've formed. They just need to remember that both sides entered into the Nation as equal partners and neither side is subordinate to the other – they work _together_."

"Do you think we'll see it in our lifetimes?" Duo's eyebrows knit, and he frowned staidly at something off-screen.

"I'm content to have seen the seeds we planted bourgeon. We'll just have to have faith that those seedling will continue to grow and, eventually, bloom." Quatre shrugged, having come to this conclusion long ago. Duo sighed, shedding the seriousness their conversation had taken and smiled again.

"You almost made me forget why I called." Quatre heard the tapping of keys over Duo's voice and raised his eyebrows in silent questioning. Duo's eyes took on a maniacal gleam. "I've got video clips of the baby shower!"

"I can't wait," Quatre admitted honestly. "Did Hilde like my gift?"

"She went gaga over it," Duo assured emphatically. "You really blew her away with that antique cradle. I thought for a sec she was gonna start crying." He furrowed his brow. "She does that a lot lately – start crying over little things, I mean." He shrugged again and went back to tapping keys before announcing, "There! I've sent the file. You should get it in a few moments."

"Fantastic," Quatre said with a smile. His smile quickly faded though as a new thought came to his mind.

"Quat?" Duo looked worried and Quatre sighed as he realized that he would have to let Duo in on his new "project" in order to obtain his help. He had been planning on calling Duo for a few days now, but somehow had never gotten around to it – he supposed he should be grateful Duo decided to call him first.

"I need a favor, Duo."

"Sure. Anything," Duo said with a shrug. "You know I'm always here if you need something."

Quatre leaned back and steepled his fingers in thought before continuing. 

"While I'm here, I am completely cutoff from my personal computers on L4 and as such, find myself unable to utilize some of my _less honorable_ methods of procuring information. That said, I–"

"Say no more. You need one of my homemade explorer viruses? Consider it done."

"You're sure? I mean, it's not on too short notice?"

"No problem, but – if I may ask – what is it for?"

"I've found another Crier." Duo raised his eyebrows. "Or rather, she found _me." _ Duo was one of the few people to whom he had ever imparted knowledge of the many sleepless nights he endured during his younger years as a result of his empathic hypersensitivity. It had been a relief to tell someone what he went through and explaining what it was like to feel your mind inhabited by another, but despite the closeness he felt to Duo after sharing such information, he hoped that he would not pry this particular time. He did not want to expose all that he knew of this Crier, but concurrently, did not believe himself capable of lying to Duo.

"I thought you'd found a way to block that kinda thing?"

"I did – I mean I _have_ – but this one's pretty powerful."

"Powerful enough to overwhelm you, huh? Well, I have a skeleton program that I can tweak to fit your needs."

"It needs to be able to dig up erased files, if that's not asking too much."

"Erased files?"

"Is that a problem?"

"Not at all. But it does seem, well, a little _odd_."

"I think some group, governmental or otherwise, has already tampered with her."

"What makes you think that?"

"The apparent coverup."

"Ah. . . . Hence the need to find that which is no longer there."

"Exactly."

*

Quatre let Duo's virus run for several hours while he continued on with his duties as a representative during the endless meetings and conferences. As he sat at one of the countless tables during the monotonous day, Quatre glanced across the room more than once to watch Relena working. He briefly entertained the idea of plying _her_ for information on the elusive Dorothy Catalonia, but immediately dismissed the thought. He could not ask her to betray whatever secrets Dorothy might have imparted on her – additionally, he didn't think she would react too well to any form of interrogation.

What Quatre didn't realize though, was that as the program Duo had made for him went about its function in restoring deleted files and archiving pertinent data, it was setting off countless flagging programs. These flags were cumulatively reported to the programs' designer with a single, demure beep. 

A few keystrokes opened a monitoring program and the programmer could immediately access all the files Duo's virus had that had been guarded by the flag-programs. The programmer glanced over the list of files and immediately began writing an extensive search program to track the explorer virus to the computer that had implemented it. After several minutes, he finished applying the case-specifics to a skeleton program and a single keystroke sent it out to begin its function. 

The programmer leaned back in his chair, content to wait the few minutes it would take to finish tracking the virus.

*

Quatre sighed heavily as he untied his cravat, letting the silk hang loosely around his neck as he reached out to the doorhandle to his suite of rooms. Suddenly he felt the muscles in the back of his neck tense as his digits closed around the handle.

"Master Quatre?" Quatre jumped slightly and quickly turned around to face his secretary. 

"What?" he asked a little more harshly than he had intended.

"I – uh," he stammered slightly then apparently seemed to get a grip on his nerve. "Is there anything else you will be needing tonight?"

"No, nothing," he answered, mildly impressed by the young man's improving backbone. It was endlessly tiresome to have to work with someone who was terrified of you. The secretary nodded and turned to leave Quatre in the desolate hallway. Quatre sighed again and finally entered his room, all the tension of the past week seeming to amass in this final act as he collapsed into a chair just inside the doorway, dropping his briefcase unceremoniously on the floor at his side.

"Sloppy," a coarse voice grumbled from a distant corner of the room. "Very sloppy."


End file.
